How Do Calculators Calculate?

Dr. Bruce Haven Edwards
University of Florida
Professor of Mathematics

“What happens when you press the sine key on your calculator? How does the calculator quickly produce the values of trigonometric functions? You might be surprised to know that the calculator does not use series or polynomial approximations, but rather a simple algorithm called CORDIC. In fact, the CORDIC method is used for almost all function evaluations. In this talk we will present the main ideas of the algorithm along with some examples.

Prof. Edward got his Ph.D. in mathematics at Dartmouth in 1976, and then joined the department of mathematics at the University of Florida. After retirement in 2018, he moves to Milwaukee, becoming a senior lecturer of UWM. Dr. Edward’s research interests include the broad area of numerical analysis. He is particularly interested in the so-called CORDIC algorithms used by computers and graphing calculators to compute function values. He is also a textbook author with Roland Larson from Penn State University, publishing a large number of mathematics texts with Cengage Publishing: Larson Texts.”